Time and Place with Simon Michael

I’m delighted to welcome author Simon Michael, who kindly agreed to be my first guest to discuss ‘Time and Place’ in his life and work.

During Simon’s years of practice at the Bar he has prosecuted and defended enough murderers, armed robbers, con artists and other assorted villainy to provide him with a lifetime of true crime stories. Simon had several books published in the UK and the USA in the 1990s and his short story Split was shortlisted for the Cosmopolitan/Perrier Short Story Award. Four children, two divorces and lots of therapy forced him to spend the next 20 years in full-time practice as a lawyer, but in 2016 he was finally able to retire from the Bar to devote himself to full-time writing.

The Brief (2015) and An Honest Man (June 2016) are the first two books in the Charles Holborne series, set on the dangerous gangland streets of 1960s London. (See end of article for full links)

So without further ado, over to Simon

Your books are courtroom dramas set in 1960’s London featuring criminal barrister, Charles Holborne. Why did you decide to set your books in the 1960s?

Multiple reasons. Firstly it was the “Wild West” of British justice. The criminal gangs, for example, the Krays, Richardsons and Messina brothers, were fighting for control of the proceeds of vice, pornography, gambling and drugs in the big cities. There was widespread police corruption, particularly in the Metropolitan Police, which meant that officers were taking a cut of the proceeds rather than trying to prosecute the criminals. There was also significant bias in the judiciary. I’m not suggesting the judges were corrupt, but they were from a previous generation. Born at the turn of the last century, they believed that they and the police were the last bulwark against a tide of corruption sweeping the country. The arrival of sex drugs and rock ‘n’ roll was viewed by the establishment with horror. Many in the judiciary simply would not believe that police officers could be corrupt – that they might beat a confession out of an innocent person; that many of them would take bribes. The result was that trials were weighted in favour of the prosecution and against the defence. Prosecuting for the Crown at that time was like sailing with the wind full in your sails; defending was like wading up to your thighs in a swamp into the teeth of a gale.

In addition there were no mobile phones, DNA or any of the scientific advances which enable modern day detectives to solve cases. Detectives from a previous era like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe had to detect. I want my investigators, including Charles Holborne, to do the same.

So the 1960s is the perfect period to set my novels. When the Charles Holborne series is finished (probably around Book 5 or Book 6) I’m going to have to think of another hero to put in the same period!

What made you choose London over say Manchester, Birmingham or Liverpool for your location?

I know London. My father’s family came to England in 1492, settled in the East End and for the next 500 years lived within 20 mile radius of where they first landed. I was born, grew up, went to university, and practised at the Bar in London. It’s my “patch”. I know it very well.

1492 stands out as a seminal date in history (coinciding with the discovery of the New World and the Re-Conquest of Spain). Was there a specific reason that the family arrived in that year and is there a family historian in the family or is it family lore?

One of my great-uncles, who has since died, apparently spent a great deal of time and money researching the family tree at Somerset House and in the records held by the Jewish community in the East End before the Second World War. It had always been family lore that my father’s family was part of a group of Jewish refugees from Cordoba who left as a result of the Spanish Inquisition rather than face conversion or death. Indeed it was said that they were part of a group of refugees in ships sent by Christopher Columbus to supplicate the British crown for money for the westward expedition which eventually resulted in the discovery of America, and Columbus paid for the trip as far as London with fee-paying Jewish refugees, including the Michael (probably then called Miguel) family.

My father as a young boy actually saw some of the records produced by his uncle which supported the part of the story that the family had arrived in Whitechapel in 1492 with a group of other Spanish and Hebrew-speaking families. Unfortunately however both my great uncle’s house with his researches, and the records at Somerset House, were destroyed during the war and all the documentary proof has disappeared. I have often thought that I should try to reconstitute the evidence, but I have never had time.

It’s a great story, and I’m sure it’s true; unfortunately I can no longer prove it!

(When I asked the question I didn’t expect the answer to have such a direct link to it. I love this story it exemplifies how family research can really bring history to life.)

Did your research confirm or confound the commonly held perceptions of the period and did it throw up anything that surprised you?

This is a very good question. In retrospect I think we tend to regard the 1960s as a time of flower power, Carnaby Street, Mary Quant, the Stones, the Beatles and mods versus rockers fighting on the beach in Brighton – exciting, brightly-coloured, and raucous. In fact the beginning of the decade was very different. Britain was very definitely post-war in the late 1950s and early 1960s. People were poor, the housing stock was dreadful, immigrants, homosexuals and women were unfairly treated – you could argue that in some respects things have changed little, 50 years later. I had to adjust the pictures unfolding in my head for the beginning of my series to paint a much grittier and greyer scene.

How do you think you would have coped had you had to operate under the same conditions as Charles Holborne?

This is another very interesting question bearing in mind the character of Charles Holborne. I try, with as much realism as possible, to put Charles under stress. For example in The Brief I make him falsely accused of a murder which requires him to go on the run from the police. I want the reader to ask him or herself the question: “What on earth would I do if that were me?” At the same time however, Charles is, in part, based on me, my history and that of my family, and so not only am I asking the reader, but I am posing the question of myself. The answer to that is, unfortunately, I would probably have believed in the honesty of the police, and been wrongly convicted. Charles is an ex-boxer, ex-burglar, for whom violence and crime come easily. I, on the other hand, am a middle-class professional who has never committed a crime in his life, and I don’t have Charles’s resourcefulness or daring. I’d have caved, no doubt about it!

I’m aware that in addition to further books featuring Charles Holborne you are planning a novel set in New Orleans. New Orleans seems a far remove from London. Why New Orleans and how do you think you’ll adapt to the cultural/language changes?

I have visited New Orleans and I love the city. It seems to have its very own atmosphere, an evocative blend of jazz, poverty, drugs and death. So it gets my creative juices flowing. I am a perfectionist and making even tiny mistakes in the Charles Holborne novels makes me cross with myself (I was recently taken to task for having Sally wearing a Mary Quant miniskirt two years before it was designed!). I know therefore I’m going to have to be very careful indeed if I set a novel in a city I don’t know well. I think the only way to overcome the problem is to go and live in New Orleans for a few months. (I haven’t started negotiating that with my family, so I’d be grateful if you would keep this answer between we two and your readership!)

Do you have any preference for reading books with a particular time or place context?

I do like books set in the past, both the recent past and the distant past. I think it makes the narrative more interesting, even if you’re writing about human nature which in my opinion does not change much. I’m not trying to educate, but I think if you set your books in an unfamiliar landscape or time, it provides an additional interest to the reader. For example, the third book in the Charles Holborne series, provisionally entitled “The Lighterman” and almost finished, includes flashbacks to Charles’s time in the war when he was a teenager effectively running wild on the bombed London streets and working as a lighterman on the River Thames. I knew very little about work as a lighterman but my research has revealed a fascinating and now largely extinct occupation which had existed since Roman times, and the reader will learn, unwittingly, something about that.

Is there any time or place in history that holds a particular interest for you?

I am particularly interested in the underbelly of old London. For example I adore Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. I think the reason is that I feel connected to London because of my family’s long history there. It’s where my roots are deepest.

Where is your favourite place?

Having banged on about London so much, my answer may surprise you. I love Gascony, and I am very lucky to have an old farmhouse there. It’s probably one of the least fashionable parts of southern France and it lacks the grandeur of, for example, the Loire valley with its great châteaux. But the countryside is incredibly varied, caused by a fan of rivers bringing melt water down from the Pyrenees. So in the space of a fifteen minute drive you see hilltop villages, wooded escarpments, clear fast-running rivers and small fertile plains of crops. It has the largest concentration of châteaux anywhere in France but they are usually small, almost domestic in size. The Pyrenees line the southern horizon, those in the foreground with white glistening tops and those in the background receding into purple misty shadows. The people are wonderfully friendly (I’ve written about that in some of my blogs on my website), even to Brits who totally mangle their language. The food in the area is wonderful, focusing on duck, wild boar and Armagnac, and the light! The quality of the light at dawn and dusk is simply ravishing. I could talk about my love of le Gers forever, and you might have to edit some of this rather long winded answer!

With no time and money constraints, where would you like to visit that you haven’t already been?

I have been chasing the Northern Lights for the last five years. It is right at the top of my bucket list and despite several trips to Iceland and elsewhere they still evade me. Lapland is likely to be the next destination.

o-O-o

I’m really grateful to Simon for taking the time out to indulge my idea for a feature and I hope you enjoyed reading Simon’s insightful and interesting responses as much as I did?

If reading about his character Charles Holborne has whetted your appetite here’s a little bit more.

1960s London – gang wars, corrupt police, vice and pornography – ex-boxer, Charles Holborne, has plenty of opportunities to build his reputation with the criminal classes as a barrister who delivers. But Holborne, an East End boy made good, is not all he seems, and his past is snapping at his heels. When his philandering wife has her throat slashed, Holborne finds himself on the wrong side of the law and on the run, back in the only place he thought he’d be safe, the East End. But now he’s got caught in the middle of a turf war between the Kray twins and the Yardies. Can Holborne stay one step ahead of the police and the real murderer, discover the truth and escape the hangman?

Criminal barrister Charles Holborne may have just escaped the hangman by proving he was framed for murder, but his life is now in ruins. His wife is dead, his high-flying career has morphed into criminal notoriety, and bankruptcy threatens.

When the biggest brief of Charles’s career unexpectedly lands on his desk, it looks as if he has been thrown a lifeline. But far from keeping him afloat, it drags him ever deeper into the shadowy underworld of 1960s London. Now, not only is his practice at stake, but his very life. Can Charles extricate himself from a chess game played from the shadows by corrupt police officers and warring gangs without once again turning to crime himself?

Thanks Sandra, I couldn’t have picked a better person to start the ball rolling with, albeit by chance. He’s interesting and so easy to work with. I’m sorry I missed the talk but I can imagine it was fascinating.